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Rolahend: Starting of a Campaign world.

While waiting for a large program to finish a test run at the university servers, I sat down and put a bit of work into a Campaign world I've been wanting to do for awhile. I made use of some of the tips RobA has posted around the forums, and learned a fair bit about GIMP and Photoshop I didn't know before. (Like how Photoshop Elements doesn't like my trying to copy paste things from GIMP, good old MS Paint saves the day once again.)

The style I will be working on will hopefully produce more of a hand drawn/coloured look to the finished map, I'm currently debating how best to do the mountain ranges, and I'm looking around for older maps. I think I might just use simple iconic mountains with a slight shadow to them.

The North West will be divided into 2 or 3 kingdoms, the South East will have each small island as a city state, and some of the larger ones split into as many as 4. North East will contain maybe 5, as will the South West. I might expand the ocean boarder to add 'extras', and in all, I planned the scale to have the North West island to have about the same landmass as the UK does in the real world.

Generating the outlines in GIMP worked well. Did a Black and White 'shadow' map of the general regions, and multiplied the Blurred (100pt Gaussian) Shadow layer onto a Render: Solid Cloud. I found that adjusting the Cloud's Color Levels to output around 50=60 on the dark, and also lowering the light side produced slightly better results.

For finer details and control over sections I used layers, building up a small section at a time. Draw a small section the size you want to start with, follow all of RobA's steps till you get to the outline. Hold off on taking the outline, and generate a new set of layers, overlapping the earlier layer slightly for a good line up. Before you set the threshold level, set the current working layer to 50% Opacity lets you have a great view of how your landmass will form compared to the original. After, use the Magic Wand tool and crop all the black out, and merge into the base.

Wash, rinse, repeat till you have your land mass with key bays and islands you wanted, with a lovely randomized coast line.

The landforms are very natural looking. The south-west peninsula of the north-west island reminds me a lot of the Avalon Peninsular in Nova Scotia, what with the tiny isthmus connecting it to the rest of the island and all.

The island groups in the southeast seem to run along three straight lines. It looks a bit odd, since I expect islands groups to form more of an arch.

The map seems to be neatly divided into four quadrants. That introduces a slight level of artificiality to the map design that subtly jars with the natural looking coasts. It just looks a bit too symmetrical and planned. Moving the southern of the two north-eastern islands west-south-west a bit and introducing some arch to the southeastern archipeligos would go a long way toward making the land placement look a bit more natural to my eye.

All in all though, a great map. I really like the color you used for your ocean. What is it?

I'm thinking of deleting the southeast islands all together, and introducing a larger landmass connecting the middle east and south west islands.

As for the blue, the map is drawn on a parchment texture background that was made while playing with the Dry Media brushes in Photoshop Elements, which really just gives a less random layered cloud effect. (You can see it on the land, which I'm not sure if I will colour or not. The water was just done with a 50% Opacity blue layer (Actual colour in photoshop was RGB 69,75,147)

I'm thinking of doing a fade effect, copying the blue layer, changing it to darker blue, and then basically smudging it away from the coastline. Apply a Gaussian Blur, and merge.

The island groups in the southeast seem to run along three straight lines. It looks a bit odd, since I expect islands groups to form more of an arch.

The map seems to be neatly divided into four quadrants. That introduces a slight level of artificiality to the map design that subtly jars with the natural looking coasts. It just looks a bit too symmetrical and planned. Moving the southern of the two north-eastern islands west-south-west a bit and introducing some arch to the southeastern archipeligos would go a long way toward making the land placement look a bit more natural to my eye.

All in all though, a great map. I really like the color you used for your ocean. What is it?

I agree with Dan. The islands in the lower right seem a bit to regular. My mind neatly forms a rectangle around the islands and it looks a bit "off".

I am ok with the rest of it though. I think the large island between the I & II quadrant breaks up the look enough in the top half of the map and the islands do the same in the lower half.

Looks like a very light violet type color with a turbulent bump map that was then blurred 2-3 px or so. Theres even another texture that makes it seem like he has more than one layer of bumpmaps involved, perhaps one with a small bit of plasma? But that could also be jpg compression artifacts also... not sure.